


la demonstración de la falacia de esos catálogos

by Kyros (anafabula)



Series: interpolaciones [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventures in book repair, Bad work days for confused gays, Gen, POV First Person, Worldbuilding, introduction, liminality, nonbinary narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-07 02:54:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16399985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Kyros
Summary: Leda Holt is having a long, long day, of the slightly strange and Friday varieties.





	la demonstración de la falacia de esos catálogos

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shadaras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadaras/gifts).



> This is an introduction to AIL more than it could ever be the full spectrum of transdimensional library shenanigans in store; as in, much more is coming... 
> 
> I may be nervous, but I also have such wondrous nerds to show you!

A day is as long as it needs to be. For it to be any other way you’d first need a frame of reference outside that of necessity — that is, something perfectly reasonable to have where it belongs, but the kind of thing I don’t know how to apply and don’t have the need to.

 My cousin does, because Camille’s had so many lives in comparison to me I sometimes wish I could lose count. She knows tracking time by hours as in clocks that measure, mechanically, only that, and by the movement of the sun in the sky; I know the edged glance toward the clock on the break room wall to my left that confirms the trill of a warning sense I feel at a level of abstraction that’s less than feeling, pointing toward the incipient end of my midday break.

 It spurs me to fold up Cam’s latest letter, burnishing the creases with my thumbnail until they’re as sharp and shiny as the paper can stand, and put it away. I smile when I do, as a matter of inevitability, separate from the fact that I already don’t think I have time to respond to her right now, maybe wouldn’t even if she could ever cut them short. Instead she’s done what she always does when she writes me back on research trips: it seems like half the body is some kind of self-consciousness about how specific anything about her day-to-day life is right now to the field she has to share with very few, and the rest is almost all minute details of talking shop. She’s better about that kind of thing in person but at her worst in unedited print, and trips out to any variation on the vast whole of the worlds’ deadlands are very tightly planned. There’s thin, fine paper enough to use freely, but far from enough to waste on revisions, and it gives me a particular, unique insight into who my cousin is, to be able to pull back after reading word by word and experience not only the information she wants me to have insofar as it’s translated and retranslated to my understanding, but a kind of wide view of how she was thinking, through her hand, locked to movement through time and space.

I know she doesn’t like it, but I do. At least in moderation; it would pain me to never see her again, but that’s not an issue. It won’t be. I won’t let it. It doesn’t pain me to spend however long (and she tells me in terms of days and weeks, an experience she, at least, finds as systematic as I do my to-do list here) on letters, knowing that.

She seems to think it should pain me, and I do try my best to change her mind about it. Somehow we always end up here again at the beginning, though, with her apologizing for her handwriting and alluding to mine in comparison. I do like mine, too, the neat round backwards slant of a literal library hand something I find quiet satisfaction in knowing I have mastered, even if no one needed it for catalogs significantly before I was born. It is a thing that makes me happy to have. And it’s true Cam’s is much messier: narrow, cramped, all spiked elipses and slightly wandering lines, the kind of off-parallel and uneven in size that is negligible from line to line and then tells a story of its own by the time it hits the end of the page. I just don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I like reading her writing and it gives me no trouble for being what’s in her nature.

Besides which, I don’t actually know how my own writing goes down, because that’s not something I’ve ever had the need of. I know Cam’s, by comparison, is fine, makes her letters once read and pressed away pleasant on the tongue and easy enough to swallow, even if there is a downside in how the spiky punctuation plays against my teeth every now and then. No matter how careful I could possibly be about telling her this I’m sure she’d find a reason to apologize, so I’ve never brought it up. I devour her letters just the same every time, and that’s what she truly needs to know.

I think she tried to learn the library hands; I know I offered. But before I knew her, evidently, her fingers had learned another language of spikes and corners, and that’s always what they make. I have the faculty she couldn’t pick up and hold so it’s not really my place to say that what she cares about doesn’t matter, but I still think it’s silly. No one’s using my handwriting for anything where the standards passed on to me like parenting could matter. I just care about reading hers. I don’t know what else I would care about at all.

Coffee’s not quite my thing — I have to assume I never encountered it early in life (Cam would know), and so never picked up the knack — but my mouth’s dry enough that I cast a critical look over at the contraption on the counter working to approximate it anyway. I’ve seen allegedly ordinary coffee pots downstairs, as contrasts to the deceptively sturdy arrangement of what looks like repurposed lab equipment here, and presumably got enough of an explanation out of that to know the difference; I can’t remember off the top of my head who’d care enough to tell me, but I can look over and know I’m watching the result of someone caring a lot about acid as it creeps up through a pipette in defiance of gravity. I hope they enjoy the result—they must, I’d think, to stick with it this long.

For my own part I lean that bit more toward tea. There’s something about it that ends up slightly easier for me to understand. A matter of taste again, presumably, and still not something I’m deeply committed to; more than easy enough to deal with when I’ve gotten down to the main floor, where I belong right now, parts of which (almost unique in the building) are open enough for liquids to be okay.

Cam’s thinking a lot about liquid right now, and telling me accordingly; she’s been thinking about the lack. It’s not surprising her studies brought her toward drought, though I think this is the most exclusively and obviously relevant round of field research about it she’s done yet. Which is why she got that high up in the scraggly group of assorted scholars’ chain of command — I think; I do my best to pay attention when she tells me even about the planning stages of this sort of thing, but it can get hard to track causality when Cam’s describing academics. I don’t quite rightly know if she’s second in charge because all signs point to that the world they’re interrogating died specifically, unambiguously of corrosive droughts, or if Dr. Emilio and Dr. Harper asked her to assist and that got her focusing even more on the memories of water.

She’s been sweating the logistics on this trip just about since she got back from the last time she’d left (that one was trees, I think, and at any rate much harder for me to follow than this has been; when I write her back I’ll find a way to put it right that I realize I’m still picking up ever more of what she loves to know secondhand) so I know my usual patchwork of scraps about that. That the team is focusing on a rough overview of a huge span of the dead continent, for instance, and Cam was fighting to start at the coastline and have their mediums work first with the wide dead ocean before they narrowed down to freshwater, planning to follow one wide dead river with an unknown name upstream to a wide dead city — she argued they’d want to get as well-acquainted with the lay of the land as they could before they specifically came to speaking with individual ghosts of human-made lakes, at the time. 

Cam lost that argument, and she’d been kind of cut up about it for a little while, sure it would be a disaster to go straight to the chinampas without context; but that seems to be more than resolved now. Dr. Emilio’s been laughing for days, apparently, because they started in the city that Dr. Harper had overruled every argument against, and Camille fell in love. She’s sad to leave, she told me now, she loves the lakes and they love her; they are more than lonely enough to tell her almost anything, she said, and gravitate toward Cam in particular. She told me about using stories from before the library to spur them toward sympathy for the foundlings from a bone-dry pier, and I thought: I wouldn’t know, I wouldn’t remember, but it helps her so I’m glad the lakes do.

(And I remember when she got the news they’d confirmed breathable atmosphere down there, too — water matters most for the broad strokes it carves for people like Cam, and this was the first time she’d started on a world so little-known she wasn’t even sure they could breathe to speak with it. She’d been so happy it outweighed all the trouble going forward; for a few minutes she’d cried. Better her than me to work on a world that wide and make it explain itself, I thought, and hugged her as tight as I could manage to figure she’d want.)

I’ve already slung my doublet off the chair I’d been sat at and shrugged it on, got the gloves out of its pockets and onto the hands where they rightly live and am getting to work hitching my kirtle up for the convenience of the stairs when something alerts me far more concretely to the linear passage of time from within the outside folds of one side of my skirts, and then is a phone, buzzing insistently. That doesn’t much narrow down who could want to talk to me, when it’s the kind of convenience that most feels like home for what feels like three quarters of my coworkers, but there’s very little sense in complaining. It’s certainly a good deal for communicating across floors. It’s just not what I’m from.

Speaking of acid, in any case, the sender is Ré coming from upstairs, and the text says _So it’s Friday_ and literally nothing else.

This is not actually unexpected; I may not be fully certain what a Friday is or how he decides on the intervals, but I know what it means to him by now and even if I treat being invited as a default I’m still always a bit heartwarmed by the confirmation. It’s something he carried over from whatever world made him, even if it’s tenuous by the time we get here why that means assembling some eclectic available handful of mid-to-senior staff in the basement and having someone with free reach through the crackling past Iris Grasseschi’s walled-off archives get us drinks from whatever world’s closest in orbit and interested in more than water and caffeine. (So usually alcohol, as far as people tend to work when they’re not — well — working, but I drank basically sugar water for plenty of time before, when I was working out the etiquete and could still pick up a tray.)

It’s silly and it’s arbitrary and it started making me happy before I fully noticed; and it’s not like I could be buying, anyway, which is at this point the only way I can imagine being stressed by the prospect.

What is unexpected is an addendum whose lines I don’t even know where to start reading between: _Full disclosure I’m still working the restoration on the Laguna Bay materials loan and it’s a lot of day. I’m not going to make you miserable_ (plural you; I know who else is included; that saves me from how well I also know the casually near-crushing intensity with which that would be delivered for one person just as easily) _but I’m definitely complaining_.

As consolation, Ré adds — that’s just about his phrasing — he’s corralled half our scriptorium into coming down too. That’s one of two people. Apparently, in this case, the freelancer they have for this urgent job part of me’s interested in understanding.

I do wonder about etiquete there; if temporary work for the library can alarm outsiders, will added informality make it better or worse…?

He probably doesn’t need me worried about him even more than most people don’t, but I still have to give myself a moment to frown at that before I shove my phone away and go fuss at the stairs until they’re finite for me. 

Downstairs I mean to make a circuit of the floor; at full capacity there’s enough to keep me occupied such that I’ll make maybe three loops before I’m done, and there’s sure to be someone who might not quite know I can help yet. I don’t mind the occasional shift lurking around public spaces (because that’s still what it feels like, for all that I literally live here, in a way finding myself back in the stacks never will, in a way even office work admittedly can) because of that, and they’ve been spaced out okay for a good while now. People don’t ask questions, sometimes, just enough to end up hurting themselves, and I don’t have the worst knack in all possible worlds as far as catching them when they need to goes. 

Also sometimes the kindness of furniture — and any patron’s experience of that is going to be beholden to what they, personally, know a library is, but we do try to keep it nice within those constraints — backfires and I have to wake up someone who’s fallen asleep over something just unexciting enough to let them drift. 

That’s very important; sleeping in the library is dangerous. 

At any rate it matters less than it could because that’s not what happens. I’m waylaid instead by what appears to be a book repair technician arguing with one of the clerks (Jolene, I think; the technician I don’t know on sight, save for how transparently obvious her work is writ in the likely-permanent patterns of polyvinyl adhesive ground into her otherwise intentionally-eccentric-looking overalls) but by how strongly neither of them seem to want to be there.

It turns out the tech’s name is Alex and she does, in fact, wish she were something else; she’s not particularly socially gifted, I think, in a way that’s neither awkward nor silent but just ever-misplaced, and I spend the whole conversation doubting Ré’s judgment top to bottom as a result. He’s fixed his eye on making people identify books needing repair earlier in the process of checking them back in — such as before something’s actually falling off, though Alex puts it more kindly than that; I’ve known Ré more than long enough even at a distance to reconstruct it all — and there’s plenty noble to be said for his intentions, but that doesn’t change that I can’t tell why he’d opt to send someone like Alex alone and without getting Arlene’s leave or at least mine. 

Then I think of the followup text earlier, of how bizarre it is to see Ré admitting anything could be wrong with his work other than someone preventing him doing it. And I’m pretty sure I know. So it’s just as well I get to curtail a mistake here instead and not hold anything much beyond questions against the people involved.

Once I’ve sent poor Alex upstairs (and gotten twin, sheepish Thank you, Mx. Holts from both involved, successfully suppressing laughter at how sure I can be that both Alex and Jolene are respectively sure their reaction’s unique) I’m sidetracked again almost immediately, two hands full of skirt and heading for the problem almost before it parses. 

What’s more is that nothing about it is right.

 There’s an altercation;

by the largest interior double doors, which when I squint make themselves of smooth glass so I know what the people there are seeing;

not far from me and yet isolated, almost protectively, by successive puddles of off-by-one reality such that it takes me minutes to cross to reach them but I can be sure the two blurry figures are alone;

and they’re a young man I’ve never seen before and Arlene Sabsitgi, as in my actual superior, fan raised above one shoulder and face strung worried and tight.

 I haven’t seen Arlene draw her fan since — well, in years. She’s only holding it, but that’s enough to make me stop short when I’m on the same plane as them, my sense of space reconfiguring itself softly to incorporate me into the best the building itself could do to spare us… whatever this is.

Arlene has a striking voice and currently it’s being paired with a striking kind of stance; I trust her as a general rule but my heart’s picked up wondering why she’s doing this by the time I’m folded enough into her proximity to make out the words.

At which point, though, it makes perfect, piercing sense, because he’s sputtering something furious and she’s halfway through a cold hard reminder that the library can’t support demons inside it.

They are frozen, at least, in an almost-private diorama of something wrong but not yet escalated.

At least. At least.

I scrub the heel of my hand over one eye and neither of them, despite their senses of high alert, seem to note the motion, which at least tells me I can watch safely until I know how far to step in. I can’t see the threat Arlene does. I don’t know from demons. That doesn’t make it not my business to know what’s happening right here.

 Ré’s right, I think wearily, and wonder if it’d bolster him, later, to be told; there’s a creep of anxious exhaustion at the edges of me, because I trust Arlene but I do not like this, because my work today was relatively light and can be spared but I doubt she could say the same when I think she was handling the new books from the acquisitions I’d all but bled over sorting out the first time; above all, damn it, Leda, focus, because the most urgent work is standing right there looking angry in a way I’m all but sure means he’s scared, with a fear I’m almost certain means ignorance—

—which theoretically means I can help, in the kind of embarrassing way, because I do know knowing what I don’t know and he’s wound up in feeling aggrieved and she’s tied just as tight in justifiable worry for the edifice of reality around us that leaves no room for this— 

—and I’m worried for both of them, for questions I don’t know how to help answer yet, for the simple abstract fact of only finding out what someone needs to know when they’ve gotten some kind of hurt first. It is the kind of thing that eats at me always, despite how impossible avoiding it is; despite how I should be focused on the actually urgent matter at hand and leave the philosophy for after. 

I try to marshal my words and eavesdrop at the same time, realizing with a sinking feeling that to get full comprehension I’m going to have to get close enough to be seen and that shifts things too when I don’t know what I’m doing. But I can’t do nothing; they need an outside disruption even if I don’t know for sure what’s wrong, even if I take it gentle. Maybe especially.

We do what we have to and the clock’s no exception, but Ré was right; today is suddenly a very long day.

**Author's Note:**

> So the fun part of doing original works is I tripped into worldbuilding and this is a series now. Of which 10k more exists and counting, which I’ll be adding as it comes to parts that can be published stand-alone. 
> 
> I guess what I’m saying is: I really, really hope you like it; and if you want them, you can stay tuned for (at present): more of Leda’s very long day, practical FAQs, Camille’s water ghost geoethnography, what’s wrong with book repair anyway, and... the name of the library...


End file.
